SEO in The Desert

By Richard V. Burckhardt

It’s been a while since my last post about WordPress plugins, so it’s about time to update some of the top ones on my current list. I haven’t had a chance to test all of these on WordPress 3.0, but all work fine in 2.92.

WPing.fm - This plugin, as you can probably figure out, works with Ping.fm. Every time you edit or publish a post (you decide to do one or both) it is sent to Ping.fm, which sends it to Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, MySpace and a ton of other social sites (again, you set all of these up). Great for pushing out new posts across the social world.

Raw HTML in WordPress - For those of us blogging about SEO, web design or development, this plugin solves a world of headache. Since WordPress won’t allow you to display raw code in a post without totally borking it, this plugin wraps itself around the HTML so that it displays as, well, raw code in your post. For example, take a look at my post Top 10 SEO Must Do Tips and you’ll see this plugin in action in tip #4.

Page Links To - This one is a must for any blogger’s toolkit. This plugin allows you to redirect a page or post somewhere else. For instance, let’s say you want to create a link to an external site in your main menu where your pages are listed. You can create the page, name it what you like and have this plugin redirect the link to that off site location. The link in your main menu will have whatever text you set up for the page, but when clicked on, the link will 301 redirect to the URL of your choice rather than open the page (a 302 redirect is available, too, for those rare times it is needed).
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By Richard V. Burckhardt

Being the Danny Sullivan fan boy that I am, it’s rare that I find myself in disagreement with him, but that’s where I find myself after reading his Search Engine Land post Does SEM = SEO + CPC Still Add Up? where he opines that SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is an umbrella for all forms of search marketing, paid and organic.

In the article, Danny gives quite a bit of history supporting his idea that all forms of search related marketing should be lumped under SEM. It’s a great read.

Nonetheless, I have always been in the camp that feels that SEM refers to paid search marketing. My reasoning is very simple. With search engine optimization you have SEO. That’s it. With paid search you have all kinds of variations – PPC, CPA, CPC, banner ads, etc. If anything needs to have an umbrella, it’s paid search.

And, what about other forms of web related marketing (example: e-mail marketing) that aren’t necessarily search related. They don’t fit under a “search” umbrella.

Personally, I feel it makes more sense for the umbrella for all web marketing to be something as simple as, well, “web marketing.” That allows better segmentation of organic (SEO), paid (SEM), social media optimization (SMO), e-mail marketing and affiliate marketing while keeping them all under a “web marketing” category.

That said, the fact that Danny has “found it annoying that over the years, more and more people use SEM to mean paid search, as if SEM excludes SEO” points out the fact that if we in the industry don’t have a standardized definition of what SEM is (and SEO, SMO, etc. for that matter), then how are companies trying to hire us going to be anything but clueless as well? read more »